TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031692/0316460.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 71

The Battle to Film Malcolm X


To portray the black hero his way, Spike Lee has taken on rival
directors, black activists, the studio and the budget

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    School Daze? Blacks complained that it demeaned black
coeds. Do the Right Thing? Whites fumed that it promoted
interracial violence. Jungle Fever? The director himself groused
that racism deprived it of an award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Feisty black filmmaker Spike Lee is no stranger to controversy.
Each of the five movies he has made since 1986 about the
African-American experience has stirred up some kind of fuss.
But none of Lee's previous flaps compares to the troubles that
have stalked his latest, most ambitious film, Malcolm X.

    X, as insiders call it, won't be released until the
Christmas season. But already Lee has fought off rival attempts
to make the film, wrangled with the poet Amiri Baraka (once
known as LeRoi Jones) and other black nationalists about how
their hero should be portrayed on the screen, knocked heads with
Warner Bros. over how much money and playing time are needed to
tell Malcolm's story, and lost financial control of the
project. "I knew this was going to be the toughest thing I ever
did," he says, sitting wearily in his editing room. "The film
is huge in the canvas we had to cover and in the complexity of
Malcolm X."

    Before shooting began in New York City last September,
Baraka publicly warned Lee "not to mess up Malcolm's life" and
organized a protest rally. After Lee lashed back at Baraka, a
truce was declared. But disagreements with Warner Bros. haven't
been resolved as easily. The studio refused to kick in
additional funds when Lee went $4 million over his $28 million
budget, prompting the bond company that insured the completion
of the film to assume financial control of the movie. That means
Lee must get approval from the bond company for each dollar he
spends. "They have financial control -- they don't have creative
control," he says. "They can't finish this film without me."

    Lee also continues to insist that he needs at least three
hours of screen time to trace the dramatic transformations of
Malcolm's life: from the street hustler who sold drugs and women
into the charismatic spokesman for the Black Muslims who
preached black self-determination and antiwhite rhetoric and,
finally, into the orthodox Muslim who made a hajj to Mecca and
embraced universal equality. The studio would prefer a brisk
compression of the story. Twice in the past month, Lee and
studio executives have faced off in shouting matches in which
Lee cited Oliver Stone's 3-hr., 8-min. JFK. If a slain white
hero like John F. Kennedy deserves three hours, Lee argued, then
so does a slain black hero.

    Since being gunned down in a Harlem ballroom 27 years ago,
Malcolm X, once viewed as an alarming extremist by whites and
many blacks as well, has evolved into an icon in the black
community, revered by African Americans ranging from Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas to the members of the raging rap
group Public Enemy. Making a movie to satisfy all these
constituencies would seem an impossible task. At various times
since producer Marvin Worth sewed up the rights in 1968,
novelists James Baldwin and David Bradley and playwrights David
Mamet and Charles Fuller tried their hand at writing a
screenplay. Actors Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor
expressed interest in playing Malcolm, and Sidney Lumet and
Norman Jewison considered directing. But nobody wanted to do the
film more than Lee.

    When he heard that Jewison had the go-ahead for the
project, Lee waged a protest campaign, arguing in the press that
only a black director could do the right thing with Malcolm's
story and pestering Worth with countless phone calls, insisting,
"I'm the guy, I'm the guy." Worth finally relented, and Jewison
bowed out. Warner Bros. agreed to finance the Baldwin script,
as rewritten and directed by Lee, starring Academy Award-winner
Denzel Washington. "I think they felt it would be more of an
event with Spike," Worth says.

    Certainly it was a financial event. Lee, who had never
spent more than $14 million on a film, demanded $40 million in
order to portray four distinct periods in Malcolm's life and to
go on location for such crucial sequences as his pilgrimage to
Mecca. When the studio refused, Lee trimmed his budget to $33
million. Sorry, said the studio, but $20 million was as high as
it was willing to go. Lee made up some of the difference by
selling the foreign rights for $8.5 million, then went ahead
with shooting based on his $33 million projection. He hoped that
Warner would come through once filming was under way. It didn't
-- a decision that Lee attributes to racism. "There are two
realities in Hollywood, one black and one white," he says.
"Unless you're Eddie Murphy, there's a glass ceiling on how much
they're going to spend on black films."

    Still, Lee is so determined not to make compromises that
he has taken the unusual step of investing a sizable amount of
his reported $3 million salary in the project. Malcolm X once
famously said blacks would achieve their rights "by any means
necessary." Lee clearly feels the same way about his movie.